A look at the state of current database architectures and trends through a historical perspective. The talk explores why NoSQL is not the answer to our current problems, and outlines why we should not throw away decades of relational database research and development.

ideeli is one of the first companies to build a large-scale Web application on the Ruby on Rails platform, and pioneered many scaling techniques that are now common practice. The application handles an unusual and demanding load pattern, with large and sudden spikes in traffic. And it is hosted entirely in the AWS cloud hosting environment. Two of ideeli's lead engineers will discuss the realities of running a busy OLTP database in the cloud.

In recent releases of MySQL the default storage engine for MySQL has switched from MyISAM to InnoDB. How will this change impact you? Will your application continue to work? Should you move all your MyISAM tables to InnoDB? Matt Yonkovit explains where to spend your time and energy if you're considering a migration.

The SkySQL Reference Architecture: Simplicity in the MySQL Ecosystem [slides]

The SkySQL Reference Architecture offers users a logical framework for organizing IT systems around the MySQL and MariaDB databases. It is aimed at reducing the complexity of many of the most common data infrastructure applications for high availability, Web scalability, data warehousing/business intelligence, and the cloud.

There have been many high-level talks about how to use MySQL and DTrace together, but very little technical detail. This talk will show you how to instrument MySQL and InnoDB internals at a very deep level, using filesystem operation latency as a key example. Other topics will include tracing InnoDB's thread concurrency code.

Have you been unhappy with the high-availability solutions for MySQL that are based on replication? At Percona, we have seen a number of problems with existing tools. Some people discussed using Heartbeat and Pacemaker instead, but the implementations were not suitable for the problems they tried to solve. Yves recently had an insight into a different approach to the problem, which can provide high availability, load balancing, and read-write splitting in one elegant solution.

Are you using solid state storage for your MySQL database? Many people have installed SSDs, but they aren't truly using the storage to its full power. Vadim explains why solid-state storage is different and how to purchase and configure an SSD-based or PCI-E based storage solution for a high-performance database server.

This talk explains the various MySQL usage mechanisms for PHP frameworks including CakePHP, Zend Framework, and Vork. It overviews how each framework impacts factors such as database scalability, performance, query optimization, and handling multiple connections.

Stewart explains the architecture that has evolved to culminate in the Drizzle 7 GA release. He discusses the future architectural direction of the Drizzle database and how this will enable Drizzle to be used as an application infrastructure component, not just a database server.

Kurt will discuss the progress in current and upcoming versions of MariaDB. MariaDB is a database server that offers drop-in replacement functionality for MySQL. MariaDB is built by some of the original authors of MySQL, with assistance from the broader community of Free and open source software developers. In addition to the core functionality of MySQL, MariaDB offers a rich set of feature enhancements including alternate storage engines, server optimizations, and patches.

Growing data and economics has produced new ways to structure and store incredibly large volumes of data with Apache Hadoop, but for most companies, Hadoop is only part of a data pyramid. The pyramid usually has a tier of raw data in Hadoop; a tier in traditional datamarts; and a tier residing in memory. This session will present the Pentaho for Hadoop solution, which integrates Pentaho Data Integration (also known as Kettle) with Hadoop and Hive to bring ETL, data warehousing and BI applications to the tasks of analyzing Big Data. The session will include a demonstration.

MySQL replication options include built-in MySQL replication (asynchronous, semi-synchronous, synchronous), external tools (GoldenGate, Continuent), and block-level such as DRBD. The more synchronous the method, the better the consistency and reliability, at the cost of inflexibility. Block-level replication offers the best chance for no data-loss, at the cost of unavailability during recovery. WAN replication requires different architectures due to network latency. This educational session presents benchmarks across parameters such as workload, read/write ratio, response time, consistency, fail-over, service continuity, throughput, network and cluster size. It will help capture the right system and MySQL metrics in order to understand a workload and its behavior during replication. Users will be able to run the benchmarks independently to determine how their workload behaves in their own environment.

Verizon Wireless (VZW) always focuses on providing the best experience to its large and important customer base. The key mission-critical applications at VZW are designed to have a highly scalable and highly redundant architecture to ensure business continuity at all times. To accomplish this the IT team at VZW tailors vendor technologies to fit their architecture, and have a multi-site architecture. We have designed multiple applications on various technology platforms, such as Oracle, Sun, and MySQL to meet five 9's SLA goals. This talk focuses on how we designed a horizontally and vertically scalable platform for a platform that provides services such as social networking, blogging, and live streaming. We used MySQL for this and incorporated it into our multi-site architecture model.

What if you had all the data you needed to measure system performance and scalability at any tier, discover performance and stability problems before they happen, and plan for capacity by modeling the system's behavior at greater load than you currently have? Now it is as easy as running tcpdump and processing the result with a tool. In this talk you will learn a quick overview of mathematical scaling models, how the inputs can be derived from observing query start and completion times, and how the mk-tcp-model tool from Maatkit can transform tcpdump output into the inputs you will need for tools such as Aspersa's usl tool for applying the Universal Scalability Model.

Learn how to use one simple advanced technique to make better MySQL indexes and improve your queries by 500% or more. Even with a highly indexed schema significant improvements in performance can be achieved by creating better indexes. This presentation introduces the approach for correct identification and verification of problem SQL statements and then describes the means of identifying index choices for optimization. Then discussed is not only how to apply indexes to improve query performance, but how to apply better indexes and provide even greater performance gains.

Users often denormalize complex schemas for performance, using techniques such as materialized views and using MySQL as a key-value store for blobs. The gains come at a high cost. In this presentation Ori will explore techniques and tradeoffs with real-world examples. He will then present a more efficient solution under development at Akiban that gives the best of both worlds without denormalization. Topics covered in detail include the why and how of denormalization, the problems it solves and creates, and the technical details of how Akiban's table grouping technique works.

Gennady will show the tools that he's used and created to do his job more efficiently over the years while working at Vonage Network, Hearst Digital, and TheLadders. He will talk about managing large numbers of servers: he has managed over 300 simultaneously at some employers. For example, he will discuss keeping on top of table growth and finding inefficiencies across many servers.

High Performance Near Real Time Analytics with Columnar Databases and MySQL [video]

Everyone wants to prevent database downtime by being proactive, but how effective are the common measures such as inspecting logs and analyzing SQL? To be truly proactive, one must prevent problems, which requires studying and understanding the reasons for downtime. We have analyzed a selection of emergency issues that we have solved, to better understand what types of problems really occur in production environments. The results are somewhat surprising and will be detailed in this talk. This presentation will be valuable for the seasoned MySQL DBA, DBAs new to MySQL, as well as to operational managers/directors and CTOs responsible for business critical MySQL implementations.

Sphinx provides not only lighting-fast search performance, but can offload other tasks from your database server. We'll cover the following topics: 1) Using Sphinx easily from many programming languages via its support for MySQL protocol and SphinxQL; 2) Unique optimizations that allow it to handle non-search tasks better than MySQL; 3) Case studies of applications using MySQL vs Sphinx.

Building Blocks of Scaling: Using Drizzle/MySQL, Memcached, Sphinx, and Gearman

Learn how to combine key open-source technologies to scale applications through replication, caching, full-text search, and a work queue. This presentation will demonstrate a real application that uses all of these components to scale out in the cloud by breaking functionality into smaller units of computing, which work as a single system across any number of servers and provide the ability to easily expand.

This presentation will cover tasks such as creating backups, setting up slaves, and copying InnoDB tables between servers. These features can greatly simplify day-to-day maintenance and operation of your database. Learn how to tap into the power and features of XtraBackup!

MySQL Cluster (NDB cluster) continues to improve in features and performance. Is NDB Cluster a good choice for you? It is becoming more general-purpose and less specialized, and some of its new features are hugely beneficial for common use cases. Learn what is new in the 7.2 releases of MySQL Cluster, and what this means for your application.

This talk discusses the challenges of high transaction loads, geographic separation, integration with other DBMS stores, and increasingly high fault tolerance requirements. It shows how we can solve them by extending the MySQL DBMS and its replication capabilities. Robert uses the open-source Tungsten Replicator software with simple UDFs in combination with Percona server to solve today's big problems now. The result is not just making current MySQL replication more capable, but also making it relevant again to users by answering a new set of requirements.

There are many Nagios plugins for MySQL, but Sheeri Cabral's optimize statistics gathering, so that adding variable checks does not add a linear amount of database stress. This session will walk you through how to use and extend this set of Nagios plugins to more effectively monitor your MySQL instance.

A relational database used to be the answer for almost every project that required data storage. A few years ago, that changed. The increased visibility and features in NoSQL solutions have driven many companies to think about, test, and implement some form of NoSQL technology in their stacks. Even MySQL itself offers NoSQL interfaces to underlying tables now. I will discuss how and why this happened, and show good use cases I have seen running around in the wild.

How ONEsite uses Fusion-io Drives

ONEsite supports some of the largest media properties on the planet, with social networking and web operations for the likes of Univision, NASCAR, CAPCOM, and The NBA. They needed the best performance possible, so they turned to Percona for recommended improvements in their MySQL infrastructure. Percona led ONEsite.com to Fusion-io, and together the companies reduced backup times from 12 hours down to 80 minutes, along with a 15-to-1 ratio of server consolidation. This session will cover how ONEsite.com began their MySQL performance assessment, the options they considered, and how they successfully deployed a solution with Percona and Fusion-io.

Increasing numbers of large MySQL applications, e.g. social networking back-ends, use a distributed MySQL architecture. Backing up such large and dynamic environments is complex. Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL reins in this complexity by providing a unified framework and UI to manage multiple MySQL databases with different backup capabilities, including XtraBackup, storage level snapshots, and log-level incremental backups. In this presentation, we will provide a summary of various backup methods available today and their trade-offs, and go over best practices based on experiences of hundreds of MySQL DBAs from around the world.

Etsy.com is migrating from PostgreSQL to MySQL, but that's not the point. This talk is exclusively about how they're making the switch, from an engineering perspective. How does a high-traffic site change the wings while the plane is still in the air? Come find out, from one of the engineers who's actually making it happen.

MySQL 5.5 and 5.6 include many great improvements to the database server, from the Performance Schema to multi-threaded replication. Peter will go beyond merely explaining what they are and what they do. He'll tell you what the new features are actually going to help you with, and help you understand when to use them and when not to.

Drizzle fixes a lot of things that MySQL does in strange ways. It also does a lot of things you always wished MySQL could do. How does Drizzle improve so much over MySQL? Come find out from one of the core developers who's made it happen.

This presentation will focus on achieving performance, reliability, and predictability when tuning Fusion's ioDrives in conjunction with Percona Server 5.1. From basic tuning, to Linux details, to MySQL specifics, we will cover everything you need to know to optimize your database configurations.

MongoDB and MySQL are both commonly used in web applications. It is often unclear when to use one or the other, or if a combination is really ideal. During this talk, we will discuss the ideal use cases for each, and how they can be used in conjunction.

Harrison discusses how Facebook uses MySQL now, what challenges face the world's largest MySQL user, how they've solved many of them, and what remains. Facebook's MySQL deployment is notable not only for its size, but also for how openly Facebook shares the details about their deployment. Don't miss this talk.